Who the heck is David Barton?

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my lack of enthusiasm for Ken Mercer, our Republican incumbent in seat #5 on the State Board of Education (SBOE), and how I planned to speak up for his challenger, Tim Tuggey. I should point out that my precinct doesn’t even sit in district #5, but that Ken’s ideological bent on the SBOE has been sufficiently annoying to me that I’m willing to cross a few geographical boundaries to make some impact.

It turns out this week that Ken’s enthusiasm for creationism in the classroom wasn’t the end of my trouble with his agenda. Yesterday evening, his campaign sent around the announcement that

        For the record, I appointed Historian David Barton as my expert reviewer of the History standards.

        Mr. Barton is perhaps the most recognized and requested speaker and author on history in America. He spent eight years as an educator and school administrator and has received many awards including Who's Who honors, two Angel Awards for excellence in media, and the [Daughters of the American Revolution’s] George Washington Honor Medal.

        David Barton has spoken to numerous state legislatures, consulted with both state and federal legislators on various bills, and has written amicus briefs in cases at the U.S. Supreme Court.

        His collection of over 1,000 documents that came from before 1812 is one of the best historical collections in the world. Barton also served on the Texas Social Studies TEKS writing team eleven years ago.

        The fact that my lawyer-lobbyist opponent, Tim Tuggey, is attacking me for appointing David Barton reflects my opponent's own liberal bias.

Ah, that lawyer-lobbyist rub again. Ken seems to have a problem with lawyers—or is it lobbyists? And as I mentioned last time, someone needs to talk to Ken about grammatical and stylistic standards in English: historian isn’t exactly a professional title, like professor, so it shouldn’t be capitalized before a person’s name. (He’s a member of the board of education, after all.) But more on that later.

I must note that I’m not an expert myself on educational standards in history. That said, I do know a little bit about history in general. History was one of my two majors in my bachelor’s work (Duke University, 1989, by the way), and I’ve even co-authored a book on one narrow subject in history and current affairs (The Precision Revolution: GPS and the Future of Aerial Warfighting, Naval Institute Press, 2002). So, I was a little taken aback when this guy was described as “perhaps the most recognized and requested speaker and author on history in America.” I had never heard of David Barton.

A quick check of Google Scholar strongly suggests that he’s not a leading light in peer-reviewed historical or educational research—some of the things that might confer upon him the moniker historian or expert. OK, I thought, maybe he’s a widely read popular historian. But folks like Arthur Schlesinger and Stephen Ambrose show up in Google Scholar, and it’s not as though the Angel Award or the George Washington Honor Medal is the Pulitzer Prize.

David Barton does have an author’s page at Amazon, which conveniently lists fourteen books that he has written:

• Original Intent: the Courts, the Constitution, and Religion, Wall Builders Press, 2008
• Separation of Church and State: What the Founders Meant, Wall Builders Press, 2007
• The Question of Freemasonry and the Founding Fathers, Wall Builders Press, 2005
• Four Centuries of American Education, Wall Builders Press, 2004
• A Spiritual Heritage Tour of the U.S. Capitol, Wall Builders Press, 2000
• The Second Amendment: Preserving the Inalienable Right to Individual Self-Protection, Wall Builders Press, 2000
• Benjamin Rush: Signer of the Declaration of Independence, Wall Builders Press, 1999
• Impeachment: Restraining an Overactive Judiciary, Wall Builders Press, 1996
• A Guide to School Prayer and the Religious Liberty Debate, Wall Builders Press, 1995
• America: To Pray or Not to Pray, Wall Builders Press, 1994
• Setting the Record Straight: American History in Black and White, Wall Builders Press, 1994
• America’s Godly Heritage, Wall Builders Press, 1993
• The Myth of Separation: What is the Correct Relationship between Church and State?, Wall Builders Press, 1992
• What Happened to Education, Wall Builders Press, 1989

Notice a pattern here? I might be all in favor of impeaching more judges and walking the landscape heavily armed, but that doesn’t have much to do with educational standards in high school history. The problem is that David Barton clearly has an axe to grind. Even if one likes his particular bent (and I don’t), he is very focused on a single subject: the role of religion in American life before 1812. If he is to be put forward as an expert on educational standards, then can it be said that he has a well-informed view on what Texan students should learn about history in the world outside the United States? How about what they should learn about Texas history? Or fields of history that don’t necessarily center on the religious principles of American statesmen in the 1770s—or what David Barton thinks those were?

As I noted above, I’m not the expert. What’s very clear from an hour of digging is that David Barton isn’t either. For that matter, I might not know much, but I’d probably do a far better job reviewing curricular standards than he simply because I’d take the trouble to call the people who might know something about the subject. It’s not as though we’re lacking that expertise in Texas: the College of Education at the University of Texas at Austin is said to be one of the best anywhere, and it’s a PhD-granting institution. Certainly one of its many graduates could be described as an expert on education. David Barton is just a guy who has self-published fourteen apparent polemics without wide peer review. Surely Ken could have found someone with an actual background in history or education to fill the role of “expert reviewer”—if he had but bothered.

A little more probing around the Internet also indicates that there are people who have considerably nastier things to say about David Barton than I do. But staying quite apart from that, we can simply focus on the question of how to formulate and pass good public policy under our distributed system of government-by-commission here in Texas. I’m a big fan of that approach, but it does require attention to the business of the commission. My problem with Ken is that he’s pursuing narrow ideological objectives at the expense of the both education in Texas and the continued political success of the Texas Republican Party. And for those two reasons, he needs to go.

Oh, and could we use a highly experienced classroom teacher with a PhD in education from UT on the SBOE? Sure we could. So check out Rebecca Osborne, a GOP candidate for seat #10. From what I can tell, she has kids’ success firmly in mind.